Drilling surprise opens door to volcano-powered electricity

[Seedersandleechers]

Can enormous heat deep in the earth be harnessed to provide energy for us on the surface? A promising report from a geothermal borehole project that accidentally struck magma – the same fiery, molten rock that spews from volcanoes – suggests it could.

The Icelandic Deep Drilling Project, IDDP, has been drilling shafts up to 5km deep in an attempt to harness the heat in the volcanic bedrock far below the surface of Iceland.

But in 2009 their borehole at Krafla, northeast Iceland, reached only 2,100m deep before unexpectedly striking a pocket of magma intruding into the Earth’s upper crust from below, at searing temperatures of 900-1000°C.

This borehole, IDDP-1, was the first in a series of wells drilled by the IDDP in Iceland looking for usable geothermal resources. The special report in this month’s Geothermics journal details the engineering feats and scientific results that came from the decision not to the plug the hole with concrete, as in a previous case in Hawaii in 2007, but instead attempt to harness the incredible geothermal heat.

https://theconversation.com/drilling-surprise-opens-door-to-volcano-powered-electricity-22515

[donco]

1. Looks prodding a

hornets nest to me. Sometimes unexpected consequences can be a bitch.

[Warpy]

2. All magma is not alike

In Hawaii, it's thick, sticky stuff without huge amounts of gas. Where there are stratovolcanoes, it's thinner and has enormous quantities of dissolved gases. Any breach of the magma chamber of a stratovolcano is likely to produce an explosion as that gas goes out of solution at the breach and forces everything else up with it, kind of the way a shaken soda acts when you take your thumb off the top of the bottle.

If Iceland has found a way to cope with those enormous pressures, more power (literally) to them.

[hunter]

3. The Big Island of Hawaii could easily be 100% volcano and solar electric.

Gotta worry about magma spewing up out of your hole, however...

Ooops, we made a new volcano, isn't anything your investors want to hear.

Bad enough the mud volcano in Indonesia, or the giant holes in Louisiana, or the flaming pit in Turkmenistan where fossil fuel drilling has gone wrong.